mprovements in processes for
making, distributing, and using gas, so that while vast economies have
been effected at the gas works, the customer has had an infinitely
better light for less money. In the second place, the coming of the
incandescent light raised the standard of illumination in such a manner
that more gas than ever was wanted in order to satisfy the popular
demand for brightness and brilliancy both indoors and on the street. The
result of the operation of these two forces acting upon it wholly from
without, and from a rival it was desired to crush, has been to increase
enormously the production and use of gas in the last twenty-five
years. It is true that the income of the central stations is now over
$300,000,000 a year, and that isolated-plant lighting represents also a
large amount of diverted business; but as just shown, it would obviously
be unfair to regard all this as a loss from the standpoint of gas. It is
in great measure due to new sources of income developed by electricity
for itself.

A retrospective survey shows that had the men in control of the American
gas-lighting art, in 1880, been sufficiently far-sighted, and had they
taken a broader view of the situation, they might easily have remained
dominant in the whole field of artificial lighting by securing the
ownership of the patents and devices of the new industry. Apparently not
a single step of that kind was undertaken, nor probably was there a gas
manager who would have agreed with Edison in the opinion written down
by him at the time in little note-book No. 184, that gas properties were
having conferred on them an enhanced earning capacity. It was doubtless
fortunate and providential for the electric-lighting art that in its
state of immature development it did not fall into the hands of men
who were opposed to its growth, and would not have sought its technical
perfection. It was allowed to carve out its own career, and thus escaped
the fate that is supposed to have attended other great inventions--of
being bought up merely for purposes of suppression. There is a vague
popular notion that this happens to the public loss; but the truth is
that no discovery of any real value is ever entirely lost. It may be
retarded; but that is all. In the case of the gas companies and the
incandescent light, many of them to whom it was in the early days as
great an irritant as a red flag to a bull, emulated the performance of
that animal and spent a gr